


fear no more (winter's misery or the coming war)

by labime



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Arranged Marriage, Dubious Morality, Enemy Lovers, F/M, Phoenix!Caroline, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 22:35:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22005571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labime/pseuds/labime
Summary: Her betrothed enters the halls of the castle alone, attired in full armor and spattered with her people’s blood.
Relationships: Caroline Forbes/Klaus Mikaelson
Comments: 14
Kudos: 57
Collections: Klaroline Gift Exchange — New Year's Day





	fear no more (winter's misery or the coming war)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coveredinthecolors](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coveredinthecolors/gifts).



> so i decided to combine enemies to lovers and arranged marriage in a fantasy setting. i hope you will like it!:)

The war starts over a complication which could have been handled with ease, had the gods been merciful and the men less prideful, but wars have been fought for less. 

Wars, she would later be made to understand, were fought because they were wanted.

.

.

.

.

He comes with an army armored in iron and armed for war, legions upon legions of soldiers ready for battle and much more yet on the coast-side, still aboard warships. Archers and supermen guard the ships by day and night and the trove they are rumored to protect in their king’s stead as he himself makes his way to his prized prey, only to find his path barred by the kingdom he had not foreseen, which no tales talked of and no one saw fit to report to him.

He had no desire to quarrel with him, that undead king warns King William, third of his name, seated on a chair which he made a throne, reclined on it as if he were a mighty lord ruling over his domain and not a foreign king known to no one and accepted into the royal tent only because of His Majesty’s goodwill.

King William listens, laughs, and tells him that if it is indeed a battle he wants, he shall receive one.

Caroline hears of it only later, the encounter reported to her by one of her ladies in waiting. She is laying on her back, splayed over her daybed as her handmaidens oil her skin and blow air over her face, the thick fawn feathers rustling in a consistent motion of rise and fall. Her friend’s shape cuts into the smoke-choked room, a rush of jasmine and lilies wafting to Caroline’s nostrils as she lifts an eyelid. 

The hemline of Anna’s dress swishes around her ankles as she kneels next to Caroline, the lace soaked with the boiling water of the basins. She has no care for it nevertheless, nor for her friends who are near somnolent in the sweet-scented fog of the princess’s chambers. She leans forth and reveals to her a string’s of information, murmured in the strictest of confidence.

“Is it certain?” Caroline asks, finally, wrapping a sheet around her as she raises.

Lady Pearl nods eagerly yet her countenance changes, the lulls of the burning candles a low appeal to her blood, the wings trapped underneath her bones. They would have been birds once, no messengers but heralds of the gods’ will and almost as immortal as they were, burning—always, always burning—in a nest of ambers, fire healing the wounds of time. Even now, the gleam of the Old Age long lost and their kind changed to resemble humans in all things, the allure is still present.

Caroline snaps her slick fingers, bestirs herself out of her contemplations and Anna out of her trance. “Yes,” her lady in wanting answers, an apology in her voice. “I was told of it by my lady mother. She was present as the new king arrived. He is marching west with his host as we speak and our soldiers are preparing for battle.”

She gets to her feet and hears the rustle of her ladies preparing to follow. She interrupts further movement with a dismissive flap of her hand. “I will talk to my father. Your presence is not required.” Nor desired, she thinks aside. Only a fool in want of a farce would think of questioning her father with so many set of ears listening to his strategies. She takes her leaves and tells them she will call for them later.

“Are you afraid, sweet daughter of mine?” asks her father, later, as she comes to his study, fiddling with one of the scrolls that litters the table, the reed brushes of his scribble scraping against the paper with rapid, efficient movements. Calling for the dukes and duchess’ of the realms to dispatch soldiers and weapons, Caroline surmises.

She steals a glance of the grainy parchment, the minuscule letters commanding response to the royal command as soon as possible. The armies are to meet near the Calm River, named as such for the merpeople that inhabited those waters and lulled sailors and kings alike to death. Then they would march to the same field upon which their army had first taken up arms to contest Giuseppe Salvatore’s claim to the lands King William now ruled, once smaller in number and poorer in weapons but united with a common goal and guided with a skilled commander.

It was an accomplishment that had garnered respect from their people and stirred pride in the new king’s breast. Their kind had been forgotten, scattered and believed to be extinct in an old, remote kingdom that had been left in shreds after centuries of wars ripping it apart, a barren wasteland where no rain fell and nothing grew in the charred sand. Caroline had been born when the conflict was ablaze and its fires had torn the kingdom, she recalls dimly with a sense of dread washing over her as she hears her father talk of the coming war with seemingly no recollection of the misery it could inflict even on those who could not die. 

_Death is not the greatest woe that can befall upon you, dearest_ , her grandsire had told her once. In her head, the memory is red, red like the blood running from the deep cut that slashed half of his face, red like the wind whipping outside the castle and screams coming from the streets below the terrace where she searched for her mother, red like the fear coiling around her throat, choking, choking, choking as she called out for someone—King William, second of his name found her gripping a little wood toy and crying softly beneath falling draperies where she hid when the fires flared up in the sky.

Fire magic, she had understood, dangerous and forbidden and unnatural. But his brother had been willing to damn himself and half of their kingdom to win the other, that which Caroline’s grandsire had refused to cede. The siege had finally fallen and her parents were fighting King Edward’s fierce warriors.

 _What if they_ _’re_ _dead?_ She cried, sniffing as she struggled to maintain the courtesy it behooved a princess of the realm to maintain when speaking to the king, be he kin or not. But it was said that her father’s uncle played with the laws of the gods themselves, that he could not only hurt and maim but kill within his own kind. _What—what—_ She lost her breath then, as if the pretender himself had appeared to strangle the words away from her. And then he had said it.

She remembers it in red too—red-blood, red-fire—even as the light diminished and she saw nary a thing, the garish contorting forms that the flames had twisted into falling down, the flickering flames of the candles and torches dying out like all fires must in the night. Her grandsire had decided to combat treachery with treachery, had used the dark arts that would condemn him to set his crown aside and join the Fallen Order of the creatures that served in the Holy Temples as penitence for sins that were deplored by gods and men.

A misty, nebulous blue dipped on them and Caroline dared not speak. Then even that dwindled and she saw nothing, felt like she was floating, like the phoenixes of old, and his voice— _Death is not the greatest woe that can befall upon you, dearest._

“Father,” Caroline says, purses her lips and swallows the thickness in her throat. She blinks, looks at the candle burning low like she hasn’t felt warmth but a few hours ago, like she is still that scared little girl crying as her grandsire carried her to safety.

“Your mother is of the opinion that we should be cautious. She favors prudence and scorns war but I will leave the steps of politics to her. She shall not accompany me in that battle or the next.”

She gasps. Her mother will not forgive that insult nor her abraded authority. 

“You disapprove.”

“My lady mother has proved herself worthy in the past. She is skilled and respected and was, by your own admittance, an asset in the last war Your Majesty waged. Had she not captured Damon Salvatore, we might have conquered these lands but the kingdom would not have flourished thus. Not yet.”

Her father grimaces and nods reluctantly as he concedes. Her people, when not faced with equal force, could weather battles with ease and although many had been wary of leaving their homes and temples and start anew in a strange land overrun with strange creatures and many new enemies, the facility of the victories had convinced them. Mortals who bleed and died from wounds that couldn’t graze their skins, their swords melting when thrust into their flesh, flaming blood thawing simple iron and polished steel.

Yet King Giuseppe was proud like all men of power are and the men he sent forth were no more worthy of consideration than the pigs slaughtered to provide him with dishes. And so they came, a never ending flow of pigs screaming and wailing, soon rotting when the tenth winter was nigh. Years of war for them, half a life for some, bloodshed and voices forgotten, but it had not been but a few dispersed moments in time for them, not even a notch warranting much consideration in the immensity of a cycle alone.

Prince Damon facilitated the ordeal, the dilettante had endeavored to ambush them in the night of the wolf, when the moon was high and looming and the half-beasts would provide a diversion. Her mother caught him, broke the hand he struck her with and his legs too in retribution for the affront done, imprisoned him and sent an emissary to the old king informing him of his son’s capture.

But even as she recalls the outcome of that war, Caroline cannot help but remember another war that ended with no victors, the vanquished and those who did the vanquishing sharing the same grief, born of the same mistakes. She remembers the rumble of falling stones, the castle crumbling, the smoke prickling her eyes, the tang of blood and the trail of maimed phoenixes deformed from the injuries for fire magic left its mark on creatures of fire and thereafter they had no desire to start a new cycle of life.

“Please, I beg it of you, allow him safe passage. It will cost nothing to let them pass the city under the condition that the man forswear to never lay a hand upon our people or trove.”

“Tis is not true. My honor and my reputation, it that not enough of a reason for a man to wage war? What shall happen if I open our gates for him and his army for no price at all? Henceforth, my subject and my enemies will demand any boon and discord shall betide if I either consent or not. Each man will fancy himself slighted upon my refusal, each man will plot to obtain more upon my agreement. Do not forget, Caroline, we are not the first royal family who have taken on the duty to rule the realm, nor the second or the third; power is fickle and changes freely. If we show weakness, they will hunt us like vultures. We are quite a vicious kind of bird.”

With resignation, her head sinks in a slow nod. He would not listen to counsels and so the kingdom would wend its way to war.

.

.

.

.

They win the first battle and each one thenceforth after four moons, later when her father comes back with his army, a grand feast is hosted to celebrate their safe return. 

At the high table, several wild boars are open with their bellies garnished with herbs and beets and potatoes, an apple in each of their gaping mouths, dripping with grease and sauce. All around, on smaller plates, are various other types of meat and foreign fruits bought for the occasion from traders and sailors, some whom are in attendance.They stand on their feet, watching the revelry unfold, the fools and jesters juggling with apples, and the dancers cavorting with the bards and the kitchen girls. 

One of them ducks when the fool bats his eyes at her and tries the place a garland of sunflowers around her neck, declaring his love and swearing to marry her. The kitchen girl sets the two trays of fine wine and lavish dishes at their table, smelling like ale and sweat, and retract back to the kitchens where the cooks are waiting for her.

The guards are standing for they have not yet received the honor King William bestowed on the soldiers that he insisted must be seated to eat. He orders Queen Elizabeth to take the necessary steps.

Caroline sips on summerwine, leans in, forehead close to one of her ladies as they gossip about the handsome men who have requested them to dance, giggles when Dana point to Matthew Donovan. She feels light-hearted, emboldened by the foaming potions she drank and dizzy from the dance.

When he asks for the honor of dancing with her, she agrees to it and lets him lead her, only then aware of how terribly human he is, eager but not skilled, clumsy on his feet and sweating in his armor. _Beneath me_ , she thinks as she smiles, falsely kind, and takes her leave as the bards finish their last song.

The corridors are a blur of echoing voices and vaporous laughter that ring along the stone walls, a flash of hands leading another to the guest bedrooms, fogged invitations and acceptations. Her eyes linger on a man, a sailor who came from beyond The Dreaded Sea, and she considers taking him to bed, and decides against it.

Her ears catch the furious sound of familiar voices as she comes closer to the royal quarters. The rolling voice does not come from her mother’s chambers or her father’s but from the council chambers where the dukes and duchesses of the realms converged earlier that day. Caroline had assisted the meeting, expecting something odd or peculiar to be said of her father’s adventures but the counsels given and received had been common, almost repetitive and Caroline had been left wondering why her father would desire her presence for such an ordinary affair. However, it was not her place to question him so kept her lips sealed and did as asked.

The voices are louder now, screams and yells, accusations and insults. Her mother is accusing the king of being heedless, reckless and irresponsible, telling him it is a folly to host a feast for ten days and ten nights, that one is enough, that they have vassals to feed. Her father’s voice is boisterous “I will do as I see fit, for I am the king and my word is law, woman.”

“You are no king. Your reign rests on your father’s achievements. Only he could mend the broken realm with which we were left at the end of civil war. His intention alone made you come here to fight, his strategies. It was _his_ words that urged the kingdom to do your bidding. You could have never conceived such a plan alone. You did not even know of King Giuseppe’s lands before he told you of it. Without his abdication, you would still be his worthless wayward son who lost more battles than he won. Gods willing, I hope no one ever learns of your duplicity for if they do we are lost. You are but a boy playing with soldiers, sitting on a throne of snow and trying to rule with fire.”

The sound of a hand colliding with flesh halts her steps and Caroline furrows her brows, teeth clenched, blood roaring in her ears and liquid fire pumping in her veins, her skin scaled red and her teeth elongated, her control slipping like it hadn’t since her five first winters.

Another noise is heard, twice, preceded by her mother’s voice. “Do not think of laying your hand on me ever again or you shall pay with far more than a broken jaw. I was of royal blood in my own right before I wedded you, a duchess and my father’s heir. Half of the coffers are filled with my coins, half of the nobles who dine and simper at your japes are loyal to me, and if it comes to this, they will side with me.”

Caroline waits, iced to the core, trying to anticipate what decision the king would cast on his wife for her explicit threat. She can picture him, disheveled and righting himself in the glow of the hearth, the clatter of his chains and the snarl on his lips, his bones barely healing, and her mother, standing tall and proud with her sword drawn, ready for battle. A soldier's daughter, birthed before Caroline grandsire’s ascended the throne, born of a noblewoman and her royal husband, the last of his name, descended from a legacy long gone after Gerard Forbes took the thrones for himself, eons ago. Elizabeth Forbes had been taught the craft of diplomacy and the skill of war by a father who knew too well how many could fall without ever dying, a skilled commandant, respected and admired in and out of the battlefield, and a possible danger to King William’s reign, thus a match had been arranged by both families.

“Is that what you want, Liz, war and rebellion again? Would you ferment treason and end the peace of the realm all because of your hurt pride?”

“Cease your whining, Bill, it is unseemly of the king,” she says, impartial, almost bored. Steel slides against steel and Caroline knows her mother sheathed her sword once more. “Amuse yourself with your games and win your battle and play your own people false if you wish, run with your lover and flaunt him to the court, I care not. But the war is not won yet, you would do well to remember this. Do your duty to your people and me or else you shall find sedition waiting for you at every door you may open.”

“We will proceed as it was agreed upon.”

The king’s word is law.

For ten days and ten nights outlanders flock in the capital of Solis, the servants toil in the kitchen, the men-at-arms settle the disputes between merchants and peasants, the inns and the brothels are swarming with patrons and wanderers from neighboring kingdoms, the nobles drink sweet wine and eat opulent dishes, the poorer look at the public spectacles in awe and wonder and all agree, the king did well.

In the taverns, at night a group of men sing of his generosity and call him the greatest king to have graced the throne, another group of no less than twenty foot soldiers cheer for their victory over the undead king and his army, laugh at the effortlessness triumph. “The king is not dead yet,” one would be heard saying, “but he will be soon. He has lost half of his army. Soon, he will return to the cursed hole from which he crawled with his tail between his legs. I heard he is half an animal himself after all.”

The ten days and ten nights, the realm thrive, and for many moons after they live in peace, forgetful of the army nearby, invisible and inoffensive. And then— _Then._

.

.

.

.

The council is a din of too many voices talking at once, frightened questions and angered complaints and bewildered confusion. The royal coffers are empty… The taxes raised too high… Those who paid were complaining about those who didn’t… The nobles had to sell their family heirlooms to pay for food and furs… Trades are impossible, attacks upon simple merchants or monger of precious goods scaring them away… People had fled, not only foot soldiers and low-ranking mercenaries but generals and hardened soldiers… The duchess of Oakedge had left and abandoned her vassals…

Caroline hears and peers like a nameless watcher, feeling cold, absent from her surroundings, the truth unimpeded from falsehoods, sharp and scornful, stripping her still gullible gaze from its protection. All their questions, she had them too, but her father had abated her worry and she had clutched to his words, sightless to everything but what her loyalty demanded she trusts. He betrayed that trust, like her mother knew he would, and now civil unrest ripples across the realm like a nameless disease, more deadly than the famine that morphed bodies into living corpses, minds prisoner of dead bodies. Is it something that pleased King Klaus, she wonders, to debase others to his desolate disposition.

Her people live and flourish because of their trades only, without it they have no means to sustain the large population of phoenixes and its peculiar needs.

All this time, they feasted on food and wine they had put aside for winter, his father congratulating himself for once more outsmarting his enemy and his counselors playing the fools in a display of servility that had made her mother rage and afforded them no leniency when it was time to make sacrifices and pay the price for their mistakes. Their riches were lost, the fleeting pleasure of finery gone, and the kingdom's trove squandered in dissolute amusement.

“He played you,” Liz said the night before that one. Caroline looked on, sitting where she is now. Her mother’s voice was calm even as the gleam of orange anger in her eyes belied it. “He set the trap and waited for you to walk in it.”

They are caged birds, weak and wingless, and no one would offer help. King Klaus had seen to it. The traders had come first, even after the first attack, armed and accompanied by fierce mercenaries, they were willing the wager with their life for the advantages a trade that the Kingdom of Solis provided; healing charms and potions and lost magic, their healers curing diseases one might kill to see heal, and indeed when coin was not needed and sacrifice was demanded, the only payment that could be accepted was allegiance. Those who still came, out of greed or loyalty were killed and their head mounted on pikes on the gates of the kingdoms. Useless.

A bolt of awareness startles her at the Duke of the Falls' words. _Magic._ The sort of magic that hurtles to mangles and bludgeon and concludes only when the opponent has fallen, no leniency or mercy afforded. The kind she still smells in her nostrils when the night is the darkest, burned bones and ashes, blackened strands of fire curling around her and splitting bones open, tongues slipping from open mouths and blood bursting up.

“It can’t be, Young,” her father claims.

“Are you sure, duke?” Her mother, this time, ire thick in her voice.

“I am. I swear it on my name and honor. In his grasp is three covens of a dozen skilled witches and warlocks, plucked from their homes in infancy and devoted to him alone.”

“Perfidious worship,” snaps Queen Elizabeth when only silence subsides in the large room, “is the loyalty of them who have no choice but to follow.”

“It bore him followers, nevertheless,” asserts the duke, leaning back as he meets her father’s eyes; “And it is not the norm for all ruler to demand obedience of a subject?”

A hush quiets all discussions, preparations and propositions. No one utter word aloud, not even Lord Fell who is foremost among her mother’s supporters or Lady Pearl who was her friend when they but girls and had served her dearly and faithfully since she was assigned as her lady in waiting, younger than Caroline is now. Chilled water hums through her veins, the truth, the long, impenetrable silence an arrow to her trust.

The tribulations they had suffered were great and when the worst would arrive for the courtiers, the nobles, the soldiers, the men-at-arms, the peasant… all would snatch her father's crown and put on the throne a pretender of whichever old family once sat there.

“King Niklaus has not made use of them yet,” Caroline says, finds her voice at once and masks the quiver in her hands. “Thereby, he must want something.” She sees her mother inclines her head in a stiff movement, proud and encouraging. “We must send a messenger and engage in negotiations.”

Her father has gone pale, looking at the assembled faces with a terror blanketed by fury and Caroline knows that had the situation not been so peculiar he would have imprisoned all who had presumed to interfere.

“Father,” she insists, a vehement supplication in the word and a reminder to all else that the decision would depend on King William’s will. A lie she herself doesn’t believe.

“Very well,” he accepts, nostrils flared. “We will send forth an envoy.”

The first messenger comes back four nights later bearing the missive of King Niklaus in one hand and bearing his brother’s head in another.

( _I wonder_ , King Klaus contemplated, _can you live without your head? Can you llive without your heart?_ He ripped both and threw the hacked body to his soldiers who feasted on the blood like a pack of dogs, bite into chunks of flesh and sucked it too, unmindful of the mud that smudging the corpse. _You_ _ought_ _to forgive my ignorance. You see, I never meet one of your kind before and therefore captures were never necessary. You shall report to your king what I tell you and exactly that or see yourself back in my care. Do not think it safe, behind the walls of your city, to give me no heed, I have taken towns outwest and my brethren are claiming each in my stead. I will come to you at last. Tell him that, of all my enemies, he is most pitiful, eager for war and easy to dupe by simple diversions and simpler tricks. Tell him that it is_ _not_ _he alone who was gifted with immortality and that for each of my soldier_ _s_ _you kill I will turn ten more and send them forth on your precious capital. I do not want a truce nor do I want peace, I want his head. He arrayed an army worthier than he is, yet I shall rend it apart. Convey my message._ )

The hall is stranded in an entombed silence, an eerie immobility of grief, as the messenger finishes, sobs softly for the loss of his brother and looks up pleadingly at the king who is not providing anything and continue to take and Caroline knows the man regrets having chosen King William as master.

The king splutters, red-faced, and tear the missive upon which one single word is written. _Come._

“War it is, then.”

.

.

.

.

The expanse of his territory widens, a massive shadow splayed over the little towns from the outskirts of Solis and over entire dukedoms, ravages the earth and keep much in captivity until all they have left is a capital an increasing, starved population heading toward insurrection, becoming so thin their flesh stick to their bones, mere skin on hollowed cheeks and protruding ribs, and as they are stripped as such of all but life their resentment grows like dark vines around the nobles who amidst the misery remain clean and fat.

 _The royal family has been corrupted_ , a crowd can be seen shouting in the streets, waving torches and spitting on the ground as the procession pass. Caroline watches, the wheeled carriage oscillating when they shake it so hard she squeals, her ladies in waiting screaming with her.

As at once her guards slay the rabble and the crowd clamors their wrath, Caroline knows that such an act shall weaken the crystal-thin balance in the kingdom. They are incensed, the disregarded victims of the war, faceless and nameless, not skilled with a sword or an ax and left behind to fester. However, more and more of them are enrolled in her father’s army. More and more bluntly refuse. An offense punishable with exile, had King William not been in dire need of soldiers. Men and women and children, all who were not abed and ill with the ailment of hunger were to join the fight.

The dukes and the high lords talk from daybreak until nightfall, denounce that practice and cry out that the war can’t be won without support, that the king has lost his wits if he thinks otherwise. The mortals King Niklaus turns are mere distractions he send forth at their army, the real menace is the men he keeps from the battlefields, who arrive only when at the end of the battle and capture the soldiers and nobles, be they on the battleground on in the security of faraway tents, who deter communications and possible alliance with other kingdoms, blocks trades and imports. 

_We are losing_ , Caroline thinks, peering out of the long windows at a faint lunar radiance, at the obsidian night swallowing the sky, and thinks it again. _We are losing._ They had endured and won wars before for they endured time like rocks hit by water, merely noticed but not felt. Without that advantage, her father proved himself outwitted and defeated at every turn for the undead king is unmoving under time and steel and ailments alike as they are.

Her mother comes to her bedchambers two moons later, dismisses her ladies in waiting with a jerk of her head. The queen moves behind her and Caroline tenses as she combs her hair with soft drags, her curls pulled down each time and bouncing up when the pressure disappears. But Caroline's body remains locked in a tense wall of stiff muscles and bones, coiled for a fight.

Elizabeth tends to the kingdom first and foremost. The nobles recognize that much openly now that there is no point in subterfuges, the residual loyalty of the people dwells for the queen and her alone, not for the princess who does not come to the poorest clusters of streets in the capital, or for the king who has food and beverages aplenty but shares nothing with the starved beggars. The war has rendered them all supplicant, the healers and sorcerers, and merchants of precious silk and summerwine, the once glorious heroes of the past… all fall to the spikes of hunger like the taverners and shepherds whom they disdained.

A shroud of ice has just frozen beyond the mountains and is expected to slither atop the capital soon. King Niklaus’s doing, his covens of witches finally put to use. The priestesses of the sacred temple had foreseen this in a dream and alerted the council, told them that frost sprayed under the witches’ hands as they chanted and that the wintertide followed their voices.

“Our barriers will not hold,” her mother says, as if she were glimpsing her mind. Or following her worried gaze wandering to the dark outline of the gates, down there where the winds are already biting. “The priestesses are exhausted, even they who are regarded highly among our followers and housed in the castle, and the sorcerers will ask for coin and food which we cannot provide without angering the rest.” 

She delicately sets the comb down, next to Caroline’s honeyed wine, the simple but deliberate gesture making shame surge in her heart yet no blood rush to her cheeks when she turns to mother, no longer able to hold her mother’s dignified, shrewd gaze through the long gold-rimmed mirror that casts back the pink of Caroline’s cheeks and the sheen of her skin. A robust, hearty complexion of someone dotted on and sheltered from the horror of the war, so unlike the dust-gray of her mother.

“What do you ask of me, mother?” Caroline says when continuing the pretense is impossible.

There is something unforgiving in the way her mother smiles gently down at her, in the vague disappointment etched in the lines of her face. “I want you to do your duty,” she says and there is nothing left of any perceived gentleness, the hardened steel of a commandant who was still clad in steel but a moonturn ago. “Our people have no food, no shelter, no safety and no reason to support our claim to the throne. I need you to give them hope. Or the illusion of it, anyhow. Lie. Feign interest in their well-being, cry if you must, hold their hands and entreat the gods with them, tell them that we shall soon afford to provide for them and remind them that we are their servants as much as they are ours. Your father has forgotten and so did you but _they_ must not or the queer rumors of plots to overthrow our family will turn into threats we cannot contain.”

Hope, used wisely, can yield more loyalty than fear. Cruel tricks, both, yet the disaster must be hindered, as her mother reminded her. Caroline nods, hardly breathing, so frozen she is sure that the coldness will find a home in her chest.

“Mother,” Caroline whispers at the queen retracting figure slipping through the door. It is left ajar, a cold, harsh wind hissing and lunging into the smoke-saturated room. It does not disrupt anything, not even the candles, but Caroline closes her eyes when the frost of it touches the throb of her pulsing blood, as if it were the king’s own hand.

.

.

.

.

She is escorted in a simple brown carriage the next morrow, the two steed’s hooves galloping and the guards afoot trotting after them steadily. She expected something else after the screams and yells of the angered throng of people assembled to beg, their hunger making pleas turn to feral attacks of all kind. Her father, above all else, had been insulted and spit on. She almost wishes for it now, all but the deserted, hollowed out streets where no life remains. There is no danger or anger, only the quietude of death, the splash of the big snowflakes hitting the cobbled streets.

She has seen death before. It is never in sadness or distress but in joy for the life lived, the memories made and shared and taken again with one last breath when the holy priestesses set the pyre afire and set the enshrined soul free to join the gods and feast with them, not as servants but as peers. At each cycle’s end, a choice is offered; on the last day of the five-hundredth years, one can decide to end the cycle, to part with life and join something grander. There are tears but never of sorrow, when it happens. The pyre stays ablaze for nights until the fire dies and the ashes are given to the warm wind when the sun is at its zenith.

There is beauty in it, a peace that only they who go against the laws of gods are refused. Her grandfather understood it and still gave himself to the dark arts forbidden to their kind, losing his name and his choice when he did. It mattered not that it was in reprisal, that it was to save his family and people for the gods do not concern themselves with the woes of the fallen. Caroline knew it, had learned the sacred rules and laws from masters and tutors but never felt it until now, standing in her royal attire with her crown and title and yet powerless as she sees a man limping to a rug and falling on it, a woman crying over her daughter’s little body, walks with her guards and sees children shivering in wet clothes, other raking up bones and licking the remnants of flesh from it.

It must have been a cat or a hawk, she surmises, tilts her head, harbors hate for the gods who are careless with their lives and for her father who think himself one and for herself who still tastes the sweet flavor of sugar on her tongue. This morning, she had eaten cakes with cherries and peaches and drank milk, still in a torpor. The rain had battered the windows and roof and her mood in tune with the constant thrum and she had forgotten why, had forgotten that what was a disruption for her what more misery for her people. Birds of fire cannot live in winter.

She wants to empty her stomach, eyes filling with tears, almost does as she watches people point at her and heads turn to her. Soon she is surrounded and the guards shield her, steel clattering as they move but the crowd does not look at her with scorn or deference or fear. Eyes vacuous, they are skeletons walking on bare dirty feet and silently soliciting help from her with a demented fervor. “Please,” someone says, holds something and raises it up for her to see from the other side of the circle of guards. “Please,” the man sobs. “My wife cannot feed him. He does not grow or move—He stopped crying as well. I would think him dead if he did not breathe. Please.”

Lie, her mother told, _ordered_ her but Caroline does not finds words or meaning in any words as she looks on. It is nothing like the houses she visited from the streets closer to the castles, people coming with her and arguing with her, nobles of blood although not of name, commanding answers to their demands. With all of them, Caroline had nodded and commiserated, had offered sweet words and promises, given false accounts of the war, promised gifts and favors once the war would be over. 

She cannot do the same with the gathering crowd so large it fills the spaces where the market place should be, shouting merchants and people hustling along the street. Silk, perfumes, spices, seafood, barrels of wine. Cradles of nard and myrrh… the nourishment they truly need to stay well. _Everything else is only gluttony_ , her tutors taught her, but Caroline doubts she shall one day have proof the veracity of that statement. 

She promises them something she can give.

Upon coming back to the castle, she depletes the kitchen of its contents and comes back with carts into which she ordered food and milk and bread and clothes to be stored, not enough to cause an uproar from the lord and ladies of the court but with sufficient goods to last a fortnight.

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The passive pattern of misery they settled into ruptures and spills into chaos when bodies are dumped by the gates of the capital. There are screams and Caroline closes her burning eyes because there are always screams and, most of the time, she cannot remedy the issues. With her mother and father back, she doubts she will be in need to.

The screams dull until they are afar from earshot and then begins again, a strident cacophony of voices and objects moved. _What happened? What happened? What happened?_ She hears repeated, again and again, a bending curve starting where it ends. Caroline allows the slow, rampant misery to which she has become accustomed to immerse her whole.

She calls for her ladies and receives no answers, jolting up and tossing the furs aside as she runs through the corridors in her nightgown. Her ladies in waiting were invariably loyal to her, choosing her sides even when her royal father was on the other, defending her as the hostility grew and the nobles turned against her and her parents, the keepers of coin and power who used it ill.

Her teeth chatter when she comes to the courtyard, the sun still curtained by the beclouded sky. She does not understand what her mother says, why the return of prisoners would lead to mournful laments, and then she listens and darts forward to looks down at the bodies, bloodless and lifeless and unnatural in their death, their bodies made of different mismatched limbs. _Can you live you live without your heart?_ _You ought to forgive my ignorance. You see, I never meet one of your kind before and therefore captures were never necessary._ She weeps, the words of the king carried by the emissary, real now, as if spoken to her directly. She thinks of the pain brought upon them before their death, cries until she can’t and bids her mother to tell what happened.

The queen—not her mother, not now when so many need her and she can’t sever her affection to one alone—looks at a man. _Matthew_ , Caroline remembers. He recounts the tale as he reminisces it. He, amongst a hundred men, had been lead by his commandant. They were fighting and losing yet then the opposing army separated and the king came himself, accompanied by his brethren, and no weapons could kill them, their wounds opened and closed off, their limbs grew again after the battle, wood and axes who had killed others were harmless to them. Matthew had chopped Prince Finn’s head, and saw it disappear in a red mist yet when the battle was truly lost and they were kept in captivity, he chanced a glance at his captors and saw him whole and among them.

The king detached arms, legs and head and affixed each on different phoenixes, laughed as they begged, and finally, when they could not, he drank their blood and forced his own into their mouths and closed their lips and noses and now they belonged to him. Matthew starts crying. “They are his, now.” And Caroline understands when she hears of the rest, the infamy committed, the vivid horror enlarging as Matthew adds, exhausted, that their minds are bound to his now, they are one with his army, could kill own their blood and betray their dearest friends at the king’s order and could, therefore, die the same death vermin can.

The undead king’s magic has vanquished theirs and Caroline cannot conceive how it could be so when he is nothing but rotten flesh and dependent on what he steals from the living, warmth-blooded creatures under the sun and the night. An aberration of the worst kind who further soils their names when he takes blood from them who have ichor running in their vein, fire-gold amber.

In the haze of her wrath, a question emerges, a terrifying wonder; what were they to do with the dead when they would rise again, as in after a slumber, but dead and gone to them for the king would not relinquish his hold.

Her father steps down and kneels by the dead and Caroline realizes belatedly that her father’s lover is among the fallen. A simple knight with no wealth or prominence to his name, he once squired with the king when they were but boys and since then, King William had loved him. Caroline turns away as his dagger slices into the man’s neck with one promise of parting just as Steven opens crimson eyes and snaps elongated teeth—fangs, pointed and abnormal. “We shall find each other again.”

“Do as you wish,” he says to the grievous who cry over someone dead, something lost.

The rest feels like a diaphanous fever dream of never-ending cries and blood; each takes hold of a corpse when it agitates, no longer one of them although their bodies remain deceptive in their sleep, the inflexible truth revealed when one lurches to bite like a wild animal, his movements an indistinct change of air, faster than phoenixes, fueled by desire to please his new master. She suppresses a shiver, not at the disgust it infuses in her but at the relief she feels when each one of them shrivels down like dead leaves. Gone, no longer a testament of the undead king's triumph to vitiate their kind, to all but kill them and leave the deed to their own people.

The priestesses come from the temples and lights the pyre that burns them, sings a prayer of farewell, and waits for the bones and dead flesh to melt into ashes. They cannot give the ashes to the wind or the sun, the high priestess explains to the queen, for neither would want it. Then the stupor that froze the people vanishes, the listlessness of agony that prevailed for moons, and they demand answers, demand to know how it happened, how it could happen, how could the king not protect his subjects in death if not in life.

“They are doomed,” claims a priestess, ignores the warning the queen gives soundlessly with the glare of her eyes. “They are,” she declares, voice clear now as she looks at the burned spot where her sister is no more. “The gods spurn those weak of heart and corrupted of flesh. We will never find them again, in this life or the next.”

The words are an endless echo sent back from all sides and the hectic madness that takes residence in the capital is such that Caroline cannot compare it to anything she remembers. A sort of savagery, febrile and mindless, that makes them throw themselves at the guards’ spears, screaming ludicrous insults and demands and invoking their right to see the king, to prove to him that he is not one with the vampyres, for how else could such a thing happen? How if the king hadn’t meant to conspire so? A man breaches the closed wall of shields the guards erected and strikes her across the face. Gasping at the audacity, Caroline retrieves a dagger from her mother’s boot and rams it cleanly into the man's open mouth. Her mother has already drawn her sword and cut the arms of another man who tried to pull at her eyes and hair when more come.

They run.

There is no embellishment that could hide the truth. They run from their own people whose hearts desire nothing more than bathing the streets red with their blood. They run like craven who scarcely have any support left. They run and look back only when the heavy doors close behind them. The root of their rage is the king and they bang the castle’s towering doors until night sweeps and after the sun rises again and Caroline stays in her chambers as the walls shake and the men-at-arms bar the doors of the castle with everything they can move. From the highest tower, Caroline embroiders with her ladies, pretends that nothing is amiss even as the doors rattle, still barred but nigh open. Lady Fell flinches and sights and Caroline glare at the twich of her eye before she dismisses her altogether.

For seven days and seven nights, the riot lasts. Until her mother sends for a friend of hers, a priestess who nursed her when she was a babe in the cradle. What is said between them, Caroline knows not. If her mother bribed the priestess with lands and coin, or appealed to her to remember the child she fed like her own, she is none the wiser. However, by midday, lambs and bulls are sacrificed on the marbled steps of the temples and people daub their faces with the spilling blood and pray that the gods accept their gifts, given when they themselves have nary food to eat.

The council meeting takes place only when the sullen crowd that follows them is but a rump of the raging riot. The dukes listen to the king as he tells them that King Niklaus is only leagues away and that a few days hence he will come and take the capital as he took their dukedoms.

“Indeed,” Young says. “It is you who assured us that it would not come to defeat. You were so sure my lord that the course of action you decided upon would end the war and restore the kingdom to its former glory, yet here we stand, Your Majesty, poorer than we ever were and divested of the lands we were given. What glory is left of your rule, tell me? What has been taken, you cannot repay.”

King William tenses and looks at his wife who does not look back. He gets to his feet and paces and tells them that no due was unjustly taken, not by him, that if they are to take back the lands they own and avenge the lives they lost they must fight alongside him. The duke rises too, his head held high. “I thereby request you to abdicate your claim to the throne, my lord. Take your wife and daughter and go into exile, we shall not pursue you. Stay and you shall perish at the edge of our swords.” 

Caroline arises too, her unnoticed chair smashing against the flagstones. At the edge of the swords, drawn up proudly, the ends are dipped in black. Poison. It cannot kill but it can maim, can incapacitate the king until he could no longer move. “There ought to be another way to settle that quarrel,” Caroline claims with unfeel assurance, trying to quell the rising panic in her chest.

The man shakes his head. “There is not, Your Grace.”

Caroline is pushed back by a hand—her mother’s, who drew her own sword and barks at Matthew to see her back into her chambers as she staves off an attack, her sword slanting against another. The guests they received see her run across the corridors and gasps, some pursue her to ask what happened and only then Caroline looks down, at her her wet shoes and and grown, the heavy green skirts now splashed with red and she wonders whose blood it is.

She runs again, her arm tugged by the man her mother knighted just as he came back from some important endeavor for which she requested his assistance. “Stay inside,” he orders when she is finally in the safety of her chambers. 

She does, no tears or fortitude left in her to protest. A servant comes and asks if she wishes for a bath, and immediately Caroline speculates. What would be in the bath and on the towels she would be wrapped into? Poison can be unobservable to an untrained eye and Caroline had learned history, alchemy, astrology, healing potions and enchantments, but only briefly studied poisons. She refuses the offer and sends back the ladies in waiting who come after, closing her eyes once her head lays on the soft cushions. 

When she awakes again, she finds she _can_ cry when her mother holds her tightly against her chest. Tears of happiness, this time. Her mother explains to her that Young is their prisoner now and so are his supporters. “Come hither,” her mother settles in on the edge of the bed and Caroline sits up upright. “Henceforth, may you be pleased or not with me, you must do as you are told and trust my judgment. King Niklaus is to come.”

Caroline’s heart thuds against her chest and she bites her lips not to cry for she knows what her lot will be then and why her mother has come to discuss the matters with her. The council is no more, the kingdom is but one capital where distrust and corruption are incessant, and tomorrow they shall die and never find peace, robbed of it by King Niklaus and his blood. “Tomorrow I am to die with our kinsmen, our friends and even our enemies, it matters not. It is where my place is.”

“Mother,” Caroline whimpers with a muted sob.

“I want you to leave. Take what remains of our people and return to the old lands. No one will search for you in that cursed place, not even the dead will venture so far into the void. Your grandsire cursed his soul but he has never forsaken us. The curse shall cover you all and you might find solace there. You shall keep your life at least.” Caroline bows, although she remembers the lands after the last conflict, how nothing grew from the earth, how the grass had turned gray and then black and knows her grandsire's words to be true. “Tomorrow, everything shall come to end,” her mother avers.

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The siege holds for longer than she expected it to. Before the battle, a new calm run across the soldiers, the troops preparing for war one last time. There is a new affinity all find in the relief of misery ending, finally, although it is in a conclusion they fought to avoid. All able-bodied men and women must fight, even the dukes and lords who had lain in the dungeons on a bed of bracken the night before, accused of high treason and sentenced to death. Lady April came running for her help when she heard of her father’s sentence and begged Caroline to intervene with the king and queen, crying on her knees as she did. Caroline almost responded that they were to be released for the last battle anyhow but refrained; April would feel indebted to her and to the crown for the perceived tolerance and such thing would be useful once her father died and she inherited all he once owned.

Her mother puts on her helmet wreathed with gold and rubies, the significance of her rank and importance, adjusts it on her head, and Caroline squints her eyes and inches closer, dread slamming into her at the terrible awareness that her mother will not come back. 

“I am unwell,” she tells her ladies who for once forgo flattery and niceties and nods simply in acknowledgment. 

She means to say something but she never decides on what as her mother is called forth and runs at whichever information she is given. The queen glances once at the sight of her only daughter standing alone in the great hall and turns away, not because she wishes it this time.

Caroline stays where she is until she cannot see her mother anymore then looks up at the ceiling studded with precious gems and painted with the faces of her family, the stained glass of the large windows displaying their emblems, if she were to turn to the right and continue down that path, she would find the throne room where two thrones are raised over the dais. She says goodbye and closes her eyes when her tears spill freely. There is no time for sentimentality.

In her chambers, everything is quiet, almost peaceful but the rumblings of the battle soak into the walls and she often questions the source, whether it’s a war machine, a duel of magic or death that would make one clamor and scream in victory. She pictures her father, dead on his back, his crown rolling in the mud, and her mother, half-dead before the fatal blow, refusing to surrender until the end. Caroline wishes she were there.

She spreads her hands on her lap and smooths the beribboned folds of her dress, restless, the dull roar of the battle taunting her. She contemplates leaving, decides that if she is to do it anyhow, amassing as many of her subjects with her and fleeing while the troops are fighting in a tangle of mud must be safer. But she cannot, a little girl’s hope in her punching wildly with her beating heart. She will notaccept the defeat until there is no glint of victory lingering. 

Later, she would learn that the fortifications around the capital had broken down five times in one night.That each time the priestesses mended it and built it up afresh with iron, bronze and fire so that no man could breach it. The undead king had been impressed by the might of their kingdom, even on the brink of defeat, but he would have fought and won had he not received the missive written by the hand of one of his spy that reported the departure of Queen Elena who would sail west and cross the Thousand Seas come morning, his chance of a broken curse dashed once more by the spirit of his mother who presented herself as an oracle to the queen and alerted her of her son’s plans, of the repulsive ritual he was resolved to see done and Queen Elena’s place in it.

But as of now, Caroline is not aware of it. All she comprehends is that her father is back, his arms wrapping around her, smudging grime and blood over her dress. When he releases his hold, her mother is enfolding her as well, Caroline clinging to her back with her head in her neck. In spite of that, the comfort reeks of danger, as if something is sleeping inside the calming lullaby. She glances around at the grim face and taut demeanor of her mother’s counselors.

“What troubles you so?” she inquires, looking at them askance but addressing her mother alone for her father averts his eyes, shame in his eyes, determination in his wife’s.

Uncertain, Caroline desires to question many a thing. Why has the fighting ceased? How could they be allowed to come back unaccompanied when a defeat has not hastened their return? Where are the dukes, the lords, the commandants?

Her mother—no, the queen, grips her shoulders and directs her to the council chambers, clears it with a booming voice that sends the servants scurrying away with a bow or a curtsy. What she is told next evokes in her a molten rage so great her hand rises and slaps her mother across the face, panting and crying and repeating _no no no no_. “No,” she refuses, “you cannot give me to him like I am cattle. I am a princess of the realm. I am your daughter.”

“Very well,” her mother says, touches the reddened imprint of her cheek with utter indifference. “I once promised you that you would wed the man of your choice, did I not? We will refuse King Nikaus’s offer if you will it so. We will fight and lose and doom our people to suffer under his rule. They shall not survive the next battles and their lives shall last for as long as you will sustain them in our old lands, then they will starve again and when their cycle will end, they shall thank the gods to see the end of their afflictions. It is preferable, I admit, to what King Niklaus shall wreak upon them. They will be his slaves and once dead they will not return to their bereaved family and friends and you, daughter of mine, shall be guilty.”

She feels the press of something dank beneath her knees and understands she dropped into a swoon like a maiden from one of the bards’ tales and bursts out into a fit of tears that racks her body. She laughs, a delirious mirth that leaves her gasping for breath, rivulets of dampness dissolving on the cold stones. Arms come around her shaking shoulders and Caroline lets her mother cradles her like she had not since Caroline was a child, rocking her back and forth so kindly she could fall asleep in her arms. Her mother’s murmured, mellifluous reassurances into her hair remind her of what awaits her.

“Please, mother,” she begs, looking at her agoggle. “He is little more than a beast. I would be bound to him forever in marriage. It cannot be undone, you know it cannot.”

Only death could break an oath taken in a sacred temple and they were immortals and that meant forever.

“Only—”

“Only an absolute sacrifice will suffice.”

“What about father? I must have his counsel or approval. He holds dominion over the matter.”

She feels her mother grows rigid, her agitation betraying unknown ill tidings not yet delivered. Caroline untangles her frame from her arms and Elizabeth finally sighs and admits the full conditions of the bargain. “He wants the throne, Caroline. The only concession he will accept on this is your well-being and our people’s safety and indeed the end of the war is nothing to disdain. But your father and I… together, we would be an obstacle to his reign. We will live in the Holy Temples and take our oath or servitude there.”

“No.” She shakes her head and stands on unsteady legs with lips parted and quivering and hands which tremble and clench as if trying to hold onto something to keep her steady, a scream building in her chest and close to exploding out of her mouth with each rushed intake of breath she takes. “No, you must not. You will be shunned by our gods. You will never come back to me—”

“You are so dear to me, Caroline, although I did not always show my love, still I am a queen before I am a mother and many other mothers are relying on me to see their own children live. It would be folly to refuse King Niklaus’ offer. You shall keep your name and with time you will keep the peace of the realm. Think not of everything lost, turn your eyes to what can be gained.”

“What of father?” Caroline asks, desperate for his decision to give her impetus to refuse or else, the future of her kinsmen would well and truly hangs on her words. Her mother steps away and gestures for her to sit.

“He agreed,” she says in a tone that implies he did not obtain much of a possibility of disagreement on that. A weakling to her mother, a failure to the nobles, a fool to the peasants, her father had all but lost the throne and would receive no assistance if he were to turn to stubborn resolution and reject the arrangement proposed. Only she still has a voice to refuse and send thousands upon thousands of her subjects to death or accept and welcome the chains that would fate her to a desolate existence.

“I accept,” Caroline mutters, the words broken glass in her throat. “I shall marry him.”

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Her betrothed enters the halls of the castle alone, attired in full armor and spattered with her people’s blood. It’s everywhere, not only upon his armor but along his face and hands, the hair at the nape of his head, where it curls thickly, almost black with the crusted crimson.

He stands tall and regal with a confidence that attests of a rank possessed for a long time and when he talks to orders a servant to fetch a carriage for his new bride, she wants to sunder his jaw, to wrap her hand on his lips and feels the bones braking, every crack of it. The tears she had spilled earlier as her ladies and handmaidens attended to her prove to be of use for she thinks she would have cried if she hadn’t already purged herself or it.

He nods at her after a quick surveying glance but does not smile or talk, though the quirk of his lips tells her he might have, had the circumstances been different, but he has more of a care for something that eludes her. Her kingdom proved to be a recalcitrant restriction in his path to Woodmallow where Queen Elena rules with her husband, that much she knows, nevertheless she is still uncertain as to which motives could drive a man to such extremes in hope of reaching a small kingdom commendable in neither wealth nor power.

Queen Elena, she guesses. It must be her. Her, whose beauty has urged men to fight and bleed for her hand in marriage. Her, for whom tourneys had been held and who refused each suitor presented to her. Even after she married the oldest of King Giuseppe’s sons, she received gifts and offers from men she jilted carelessly and yet still pursued her relentlessly. _It is lust, then_ , Caroline decides, _that called him forth and made him bargain with my lady mother for safe passage, all so he could find her and take her as his own._

She takes his hand unflinchingly, the rough quality of its bloody and rusted surface rubbing unpleasantly against her own hand when he conducts her to the temple like a young gallant coming to court a maiden. Her nails dig into his skin. What manner of farce is this? She wants to ask when he helps her into the carriage, his courteous and accented speech suitable for court, not for the transaction he contrived for himself. His chatter stops and when it does, he expects something of her. She perceives it in the lazy tilt of his head and the sudden interested in his eyes, keen and calculated, and she decides that regardless of what it might be she will not serve him the polite exchange which the prolonged silence requires of her.

When she descends, a priestess whose name she cannot remember welcomes them into the temple and hands them the customary blessed water and clothes to clean themselves of sin, hers are invisible and unmovable as she slides the wet cloth over her forehead and cheek and neck, his drip red into the clear basin and the mockery she sees crosses his face leaves her speculating why he partakes in the ritual at all. 

Two other priestesses appear and clean their hands, another pours embers into their upturned palms. It is merely a tingling line for her but at his slight recoil, her head jerks back and she considers him with contempt. Her people had feared him like a plague come to devour them all, like a celestial entity of death, but he is really just a man, breakable in his weaknesses. His skin burns and knits itself, but she has already seen and she shall not forget that he can be wounded.

A bolt spears her when their hands brush at the altar, when the priestess tie their hands with tendrils of fire she waves into their skin, and recites her appeal to the gods. Caroline looks at him then, her terror crisp and tangible and thinks, a rush of ice washing over her back, _do you know what this means?_ He cannot understand but he does now, she notices his weary awareness, his obvious displeasure at the magic—primeval and heady and unknown to him—that can be felt around them. It does not signify much to him, she knows, and when the time comes he will renounce his vows and his honor, both. But to her, it is the difference between concord and damnation. 

Once it is done, she breathes, mouth dry and throat parched and he tips her chin up to kiss her lips, a branding iron that seals the ordeal. Upon a reflex, her lips part when she feels his tongue and she kisses him back for the time it takes until he leans back.

By the morning, a council has been reunited to discuss the terms of peace, the king and queen withdraw from their duties, their crowns, their vows, and their names are taken, a dynasty is trampled to the ground, a new council elected and a crown has been given. She is the queen now. The pitied queen with no power, sold and bought for nothing, with a crown of paper and a legacy of worms, last of her name for she cannot be with child with a dead man’s seed. The king—her husband—does not spend the night with her and departs with his brothers and troops immediately once his control is exercised, leaving his wife untouched by him and leaving one of his brothers along with his retinue to establish his rule in the kingdom where he will now reside.

“Your Grace.” Prince Finn turns to see his new sister and, like he always does, greets her with a bilious combination of respect and indiference. “A word, please.”

“Certainly,” he says, voice monotonous and bored, and dismisses his page briskly with a gesture to the scrolls he was inspecting. The finance of the realm, Caroline recognizes the records immediately and knows that soon the royal coffers will be opened and relocated. She would object if her mind was not feverish with worry, her chest tight with worries that made her runs around the castle in disarray.

“I desire to see my parents at once,” she commands and refuses to ask. The mirage of a once-held power is a deception she will use for as long as it will provide an advantage. 

“They are gone. The king ordered their journey to the Holy Temples where they shall stay.”

She cannot pretend to be shocked, cannot even summon rage or grief to divert her from the evidence of her loss. Knees nearly buckling, she inhales and exhales and blinks away the tears pooling in her eyes, a lump forming in her throat as she feels distraught anguish opening up with ferocity. She quenches it down quickly, feels akin a cold vacant, shell of herself, pain and joy eradicated. _Good_ , she decides, _let it end or else the grief is like to be my_ _undoing_. Against her will, something must have appeared on her face for the prince watches her with a semblance of sympathy and excuses himself.

Bile stings her throat and she wishes for the comfort of her familiar bed more than anything else, for the calming tonics that dragged sleep to her in a swift wave of calmness, a sweetly sick torpor that made her muscles lax and heavy and her nights peaceful. She wonders where her personal healer could be, if she is gone as well. Dead or alive, it matters not anymore, absence is felt the same when there can be no return.

She walks the sinuous corridors and shifts her path to the council chambers where another battle is fought. At her appearance, the lords and ladies rise from their chairs. The dukes and duchesses, as she learns it from Lord Fell who bows and kisses her hands and slips a piece of paper into it, have been all but forced out of the castle. _Smart_ , Caroline thinks. Now that he had decided that this kingdom and its people would belong to him, the king would not rashly take all their power and destitute them completely at risk of another insurrection but he would not permit them the opportunity to strengthen their power either.

She listens to the names listed by the prince who enumerates each death of her kinsmen with dispassionate patience. When he is done, the air in the room has thickened into a silenced rage yet the spoils of war have to be split and shared among the victors. She is herself no stranger to the proceedings, the lands they have claimed as home once belonged to another kingdom, dragged out of King Giuseppe’s hands with the capture of his only heir. Sorrow cannot be a component in that negotiation.

When the end of the day approaches, she has arranged suitable matches for her ladies, secured seats in the council for her allies and has ensured that the courtiers she distrusts would not be near the capital again.

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The gifts come to her when she is in the sewing chambers with her ladies, trying to calm her dormant agitation with needlework but prickling her fingers more often than she pierces the fabric and a gift from her husband is announced by a page who upon her nod of compliance lets three men come in and sets upon the carpeted floor a box of fine wood, the craft of the silver latch a beautiful thing to behold, delicate and intricate.

“Open it,” she bids with vague curiosity.

There are jewels of the color of peaches in summer, there are layers upon layers of silk made of dusky rose, opulent shades and hues of azure, there are beige draperies folded straight and soft to her fingers, there are stones that are pristine white, ivory and marble and cold like nothing is in Solis, there are statuettes of figures she knows not composed of amethyst and jade. With much reluctance, she admits to herself that she has never received so luxurious a gift.

“It must be the riches he stole from Queen Elena,” says April Young, sour-faced and black-robbed, her mourning not yet over. Soon she would be the Duchess of The Falls, a distinction she would refuse even presented by the gods, if it meant having her father back.

“It is not,” Lady Sage correct her with her eyes fixed on her unfaltering needle.

“Is it not so?” Caroline interrogates her with exaggerated surprise that borders on mockery.

The ply of the lady’s needle stops as she looks at her as the protocol demands it. She is far too brash for a lady of low lineage, whose only title had been granted to her by her lover, however Caroline knows her confidence and impertinence is not wholly unwarranted for, despite King Niklaus's persistent refusal to marry her to his brother, the latter himself refuses to marry another but her. On pain of death, he braved his brother’s order and bequeathed to her lands and domains, as well as a place at court by his side. If a conflict is to arise between them, Prince Finn would undoubtedly take her side and Caroline’s position is not secure yet to invite conflict over such petty matters.

“Those gifts come from our kingdom. I recognize the craft of the artist and his flair for details. That very stone you hold was given to His Majesty by his beloved sister who knows of his love for rarities. He must hold you in high esteem to gift you with his favorite.”

“He must,” she accepts with a nonchalance she does not feel.

She senses suspicious gazes bearing down upon her and ascribe another intention to the gifts he sent to her. It had been utmost naivety on her part to suppose he only wanted to buy her and her loyalty and not consider what her supporters would think of the king’s conspicuous fondness for his new queen. 

They deem it strange, at first, and then treacherous when several other parcels and boxes appear each moon they spent apart, a letter written by his hand sometimes attached to the gifts. Her allies whisper behind their hands and the room hushes when she is announced and the streams of rumor continue again once she leaves.

His impending gifts start to resemble a challenge more and more, the same ominous sensation she felt when her army marched to battle to meet his when they were warring. And they still are, except she now does not have her mother to guide her, her father to console her, and the safety of a home of her own. Everything here belongs to him, she understands it slowly. Everything he takes, he does not share.

To refuse his gifts would reassure her allies but arouse hostility from his and selling her heirlooms is unthinkable. _If I must play by his rules, I will_ , she decides by nightfall. The jewels of the crown stay enclosed in her coffers but the coin left to her, the jewels offered over the years, she can give it all without raising the barest protest. In the end, the most precious thing mingled to the expensive jewels is the memories she has of receiving them from her friends and parents, the surge of happiness that she now finds is frost in her veins. 

When traders come, she invites them discreetly in her chambers under the guise of buying items from them and instead sells the various necklaces, bracelets, rings, and gemstones for a fair price. 

She clothes and feeds the forgotten population living in the stinking streets in the filth of the sewers and the vestiges of the last war, their dead rotting with flies hovering over them, the earth too solid to dig into. She promises she will come back with help and hates herself when they cry and kiss her hands. She does want to help them to the best of her ability, but her motives remain selfish and her reward is not their gratitude but her allies’ approval.

She has morphed into something she once hated. She had to.

.

.

.

.

That night, Lord Fell comes into bedchamber and burns incense until it fills the room in swirls of pale smoke. When she opens her mouth, outraged at this unprompted visit into her bedchamber he holds a finger to his lips, soundlessly urging her to silence. With pursed lips, she consents to the request and waits for him to speak.

“They can be killed,” he says. “They can all be killed.”

He talks of bloodlines, of white oak stake, of things he himself has come to known only recently in a missive King Damon sent him before King Niklaus pillaged his kingdom and killed his wife.

“He wanted his death and left this message whereby we shall dispose of him.”

Caroline drops the decanter of wine she holds and leans on the pillar she can only feels beneath her fingers.

He can be killed.

.

.

.

.

She sees treason in hidden alcoves, assassins paid in gold in twisted shadows at night, poison in the drinks she tastes and the dishes she eats. It is inevitable. A monarch’s rule is long when one’s life is everlasting and even the best monarch can incur the wrath of his kinsmen. It is akin a spiral, insidious and deep, a vat of thickening water where one could drown and maybe find peace.

Caroline remembers being a child, the long days of sun wasted in the meadows with a baroness of her father’s choosing trailing after her, the mastery of the lyre and various dance, the makings of potions and healing spell, how tears of their kind could mend an ailment or burn a bone, the stars in the sky and the meaning of each line, clapping her hands and running into her father’s arms when he came back after long, long days of absence, the daydreaming of princes and her boredom as her tutors insisted she must know the events of the past for time was akin a circle, like everything else was in life. She remembers listening, the memory grainy even now and seen across percolating inattention, the name of queens who grazed power and lost it.

One had been given the throne when her husband‘s cycle ended with no heir or family to do his duty; she was ambushed by a mob lead by a boy of fifteen years of age who claimed to be the natural son of the king and resembled him in not every way but the most important. He was a gifted orator and he had convinced noblemen of power to rally to his cause. She was never seen again, her name forgotten with dusty records and dates. The boy was king for half his age before he was poisoned in such a way that he could no longer do his duty as king.

There was another. She slain her brothers and sisters first in line to the throne, kept them alive in severed parts she dangled off the walls of her castle, and met every objection to her rule with an order to her gaoler to imprison the traitors in the dungeons until the dungeons were brimming and the bars, cursed though they were, eventually blasted open. She still lives to that day in the same dungeon. For a thousand and one years hence there were no more queens.

There was another. A soldier who served the last and brief republic, she cleansed the realm from lawless men who turned into beasts once a night and hide under a mask of flesh the rest of the moonturn. She fastened cursed chains around their necks and watched them choke on the full moons, writhing and screaming. She was fair of judgments and harsh of punishments and loved dearly by the people. When the issues of inheritance came she married a duke and had children with him. The duke poisoned her followers’ mind and convinced them he was her counselor before he became her lover and then her husband and that it was he who was deserving of the crown. Under the threat of having her children killed, she accepted to join the Holy Order and was never seen again.

There was another. A whore who let men fuck her behind her barn for a coin and bread. One night a man fainted at her door, asking for shelter. An outlaw, she was certain, bloody and dirty and running from someone or something. The regent’s justice, most likely. She helped him and nursed him back to health and when the time came for him to leave and tell her the truth she was foolishly in love and he was more the fool for believing she would be accepted once he took back his position from his uncle. When he was abducted and his wife formed a regency council for her son, the boy was called illegitimate and the queen was dragged on the streets where she was raped and exiled.

There was another. She ruled fifteen-hundredth years until she bore her husband a child, a son. He grew to be greedy and envious and quick to draw his sword. He awaited patiently for his mother to say her farewells to the world she had inhabited so long at the end her of her fourth cycle. When she tired of patience and told him forthright that the kingship would not be his but would pass to his younger sister, he toppled her reign and forced her to abdicate her authority.

There was—

Caroline. Her story is not the worst, some would even think it a happy one. All that was required of her was to abide by the promises she made, the word she gave to her new husband, yet she wanted more.

She looks at the throne like she did so many times and thinks, _it should be me_. By right of contest, her husband owns it and owns her and the grief she surmounted, the sacrifices she made, all have come to naught. She will never see her mother again, will never talk to her father again, will never hold a child of her womb in her arms, will share a loveless marriage with a husband she despises and who has little regard for her. _It should have been me. I should be queen and he should kneel._

.

.

.

.

He comes back marred from the war, a deep cut not yet healed descending from his eyes into his neck, the seams of the skin jagged and furrowed down. Queen Elena did not surrender without a fierce battle, it would seem. Her friend was a witch, Caroline heard, and she must have tried to save her, for all the good it did the dead queen, even a Bennett was no match for the powers of a full coven hailing down on one single witch. 

The polished sword at his hip gleam when he hands it to his squires with strict instructions to return it to his quarters and takes her hand in his and kisses it softly and she has the resist the impulse to pull back and wipe her hand clean. He does smile this time—smirk, as if finding entertainment in her attempts at a private rebellion—and introduces her to the brothers she knows of sight alone; Prince Elijah, older than her lord husband and younger than Prince Finn, and Kol, the younger of all his brothers. He kisses her hand long enough for it to be considered improper and Caroline takes it back, not startled to find herself a pawn in yet another game, admittedly a silly one for once. 

The king’s brother is a wastrel, skilled with an ax in the battlefields and useless in times of peace, he jests and jeers, both childish and vulgar in his barbs, as he tells her with a flourish of his hand at dinner that there is another of them with whom she is not acquainted. Princess Rebekah who stayed behind and was given her brother’s kingdom to rule on his behalf for the duration of his absence.

Caroline determines that he reveals his secrets most easily when she refills his cup and so demands a servant to bring about the finest summerwine they own and opens a cask he drains, talking about _others_ siblings, his parents, the time long forgotten when they were weak of flesh and sailing the seas, pillaging on their way to feed on stolen freight. 

“You were humans, then,” she understands, baffled although she should not be, Lord Fell's words ringing clear in her head.

She has seen them turn her subjects into mindless parasites, has seen that a vampyre’s existence is a transformation that begins with life, and then dead, and then life again, unavailing and stabbed by a hunger that cannot be sated.

“How?” breathes the word. “How did you become what you are?”

A warm breath fans the nape of her neck and she stiffens, the hairs of her arms raising. The king slides his arm from her shoulder to her wrist, something whittling her skin at the gesture that feels too indecent to made in plain sight, in a manner that differentiates from his brother’s deliberate attention earlier. It feels intimate, sensual in a way only lovers can be, in a way she cannot stop. As she swivels to survey him, her hand comes to cradle his cheek, traces the ragged strips of flesh clinging there below his eye and wishes could claw it out and watch him bleed out.

“If you wanted a tale, you could have asked one of me. It is after all my story to tell.”

“I did not wish to bother your rest after your long journey, husband. You work tirelessly for the felicity of our kingdom. A day has not passed and already you are holding court and assuaging our subjects’ fears.” Bribed them, most likely. For reasons that she cannot begin to fathom and which he refuses to divulge, he insists upon the restoration of the kingdom he almost ruined. 

Two moons henceforth, he introduces taxes that make farmers furious and divest the nobles of their personal coffers. They all protest and petition for the establishment of another council to deliberate the matter and Klaus indulges them in their raving, lets them talk until they quiet down and refuses bluntly with no more than one word and no explanations, defy the great lords to duel him in a single combat if they will it and when no one breathes a word of it again returns to his hunting party with his brothers. They are furious and issue threats of moving their business somewhere else but soon enough benefits come from the short period of austerity and they reap enough coin in silver and gold to hold their tongues. 

He changes the canals underground in order to provide water even in remote areas of the kingdom, purifies the desolate streets swarmed with puddles of shit coming from the sewers, invites trades between his kingdoms and theirs, utilizes all he can gain of Queen Elena’s ravaged kingdom to embellish Solis, encourages the guests they receive into their castles and hunting lodges to turn to phoenixes’ medicine and charms. The traders who rebuked the prospects of commerce with the kingdom because of her husband now come running back because of him and Caroline feels like she might swell with her bitterness of that irony, shaking her head when one of her ladies inquire as to the cause for her merriment.

One by one, they genuflect, the lords and ladies, the soldiers who fought against him, the great dukes and duchesses shunned away from the court, the peasants who suffered first and endured the most, and look at their king anew with reluctant admiration. even her greatest allies confess that the new king succeeded in what King William couldn’t accomplish and she is ill with fury. She snaps that it is her father who safeguarded them and the answering silence is enough to let know what they know of her father, of his vices and shortcomings and how little they esteem him.

Idly, she wonders if he has gone mad yet. She heard tales of what transpired behind the sacred walls, the sentence incurred to those who dared to spurn the gods and their laws. No pain, no torture was inflicted on the guilty men and women, instead, they were immersed in a pit where they could see or feel nothing, their tongues taken away from them so that even their voices could not assuage their solitude. Would they call for her? Her father first, surely, and then her mother who would cave only once her abiding perseverance would leave her. After they would lose their spirits and not before would they finally be allowed to serve amid the priests and priestesses. The apple she nibbles on feels like fresh ashes on her own tongue. 

By nightfall, she sits next to the king on the high table as he finishes the negotiations with a king come from beyond their territory who requests their help—her husband’s help, her husband’s naval army, her husband’s kingdom, she has just come along with the acquisition—for a pressing matter of pirates. Caroline listens only absentmindedly, more vexed due to her husband soliciting her presence for the interminable encounter than she would be at being crudely dismissed.

She peers at her friends, at their happiness that exhibits her own lack of joy, her fears of never finding it again. _You have not been yourself_ , a trusted friend of hers had told her. Caroline pointedly told her to remember her place. 

Her husband says something she did not care to listen to and the court looks on and claps and cheers and whistles, loud and boisterous, and Caroline finds it harder to tolerate. All those duplicitous lords and ladies, self-serving and dishonorable who seek self-advancement and nothing else. With rising consternation, she scrambles for a tether, something she could still hold. But there is nothing.

She doesn’t know how long she sits as the walls advances on her, how she managed not to edge back when the phantom of her mother’s voice pleads something she cannot remember.

She gets to her feet and leaves the feast, running to her bedchamber. With some difficulty, she unlaces her corset and take off the pins in her hair.

“Is something amiss?”

Her stomach roils. He has taken everything from her, even her parent’s last moments of freedom, had told her to stay in the bedroom she was conducted to and wait for him and she did, the prized whore sold for a kingdom, but her buyer never came and only his brother would answer her. Would it have changed much if she locked eyes once with her parents before she was deprived of them? Would it have eased the pain or brew more suffering? She will never know.

“Nothing is amiss. I simply wished to rest.”

“You left quite abruptly. It was noticed.”

It would have embarrassed her, under other circumstances, to know that she was the talk of the court but she cares not for his reputation or the shame she might bring to his name. _His name doesn’t_ _een_ _belong to him_ , she thinks, taking pleasure in that fact. Klaus. Niklaus. Nik. Mikaelson. All was given by a father who hated him, fooled by his wife who betrayed and lied when she presented her crying son to her husband.

She draws in a shuddering breath. “You have my apologies. It will not happen again.”

“It is not your apologies I want.”

“What it is you want, then, to claim your rights?”

He laughs at that, and shakes his head as he looks down, eyes glowing with fondness when they find hers again. She would prefer offended anger or careless acceptation of the offer she gives but she knows he does not like things won easily, that it’s what incites his intrigue, her stubborn refusal to be bought and doted upon, the temper she tries to hide less and less. He takes pleasure in chasing a running prey like a wolf does.

“If I wanted a woman to warm my bed, I would only have to solicit one among the ladies of the court,” he speaks, with unveiled intentions for once.

Frowning, she mulls over this with a flicker of interest. The oddity briefly surprised her when she observed him refusing ladies’ advances, some of remarkable beauty and wealth, fit to be a king’s mistress, yet he installed none as his mistress not even the woman who formerly warmed his bed, a witch called Gretta who glared at her as if _she_ had caused her offense the day she was made to curtsy upon her arrival in the throne room.

Caroline disregarded it with a scoff when her ladies reported it to her as she ignores it now. “Then what do you want from me?”

He closes the door and falters, his assurance wilting into an uncertain eagerness, all too soft and benign, and Caroline wonders what possesses him so to act the enamored fool now of all times. She faces away from him, rests her arms by the sill and hopes that he will understand the meaning of her demeanor and leave her to her peace.

“Do you wish for company?”

The bridle she knotted her tongue with come undone as she turns, a pressure propelling her until she comes to face him, heeled shoes clicking along baking flagstone. She used to love the fire littered about her chambers, the warmth radiating from it but lately she feels coldness even as she sweats amidst the fog of her bath chamber and she has one man to blame for that.

She tells him that much and tells him he is a fool if he thinks she could even forgive him and sees his brief tenderness hardens into wrath at the insult. He retorts with hurtful truths and shameless slander and she finally screams that this marriage is her greatest shame.

“The tale of your birth is known across the realms, Your Majesty. You are not a king nor the son of a king but the baseborn bastard son of a lesser lord with whom your mother mated. I am noble of name and birth and was intended for a man of my own rank. Everything you have, you have stolen it like the raiders you seek to stop for that man who calls himself king. Would it be that you joined them, at least there would be no pretenses to hide your shame or mine.”

A hand wraps around her throats and muffles her voice as she meets his eyes with unwavering scorn even as he lowers he his face so close to her she fears he might bite her. “You speak the truth. But let me tell you a little secret, all of it does not mean _anything_ for I alone can make or break kings and queens and fracture kingdoms to my pleasure. For all your royal blood and noble lineage, your riches and reputation had to be granted by someone, one day. I have taken everything I wanted with iron alone. I can make or break you and this kingdom with a snap of my fingers. What keeps you alive is my word alone given when your mother begged for it and I trust you know that I excel in finding loopholes where no one might perceive them. Do not forget that.”

She removes his hand from her throats and scalds his skin to the bones when she does, fury twisting wildly inside her. “Trust me, I will not.”

When the castle is asleep and the king occupied with plans of war, she burns incense and sends word for Lord Fell to search for the white oak stake in secret, that they shall win back the support they lost and prepare for war once more.

.

.

.

.

(When the time comes, she does kill him, or tries to. When she uncovers that no oath is stone and iron and that loyalties can be changed as greed creeps up, rebellion breaks out and desires are unleashed, she understands how she can win. She understands it later, decades hence, after the first time they lay together. The answer to her deliberations, she finds it in his words, in the trust he eventually places in her, and when he does, she uses it against him, because just like him, she never forgets where she comes from.)

.

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.

A strange game originated in the woods moons before with first only the king and his people participating and then her own. They took mortals there and when the moon loomed in silver and the king shifted into a beast, the mortals were hunted, flayed, and killed. It was said in fearful whispers first and then louder, in acceptance. Reverence, even, and something terrible reared up in the kingdom. The feeble creatures living there had been all but extinct in the wars and her people forgot that they must have been more than pets they kept in collars and used for their amusement, that had they been friends and allies capable of love and intelligence.  
  
Caroline didn’t try to remind them, to curb them of their barbaric inclinations. Once, they flayed the werewolves they consider friends now and swaddled themselves in furs they wore with skin and flesh still bleeding. They will remember when they see it fit to and will rewrite the past to make each other horrified observers.  
  
For now, they are content with the bodies provided, still alive and warm, to practice their magic and alchemy on. Her mother would have protected them as she would protect her own but Caroline is not her mother, not even close. Her mother was sentimental and obstinate, her obstinacy Caroline shares it with her, her sentimentality she had dispensed with.  
  
Her husband returns in the morrow after these nights, the potent scent of blood drenching his clothes, the same rich lather and brocade he wore as he retired with his brothers and friends the night before. Sometimes she dances with her husband and forgets who is. Sometimes he strokes a different kind of fire inside her, a desire for a heated encounter, for a respite from her continued dismay, for a man’s touch and cock and she tells herself it is all she wants in truth, that anyone would do.

He looks at her with undisguised lust and she feels rancor for this too, the unfulfilled sting of passion he manages to effortlessly stir in her sometimes, which reminds her she is not yet a corpse laying away in its last moments before death.  
  
“What are you doing here?” she asks with the imperious tone that became natural after years of ordering courtiers.  
  
“I wanted to see you,” he says simply but that is not the only thing he wanted.  
  
They are known to be avid, her people and his, and are not prone to refuse all manners of delights when they arise. Her heart pounds, her desire pooling low in her belly, and she finds she quite likes having her husband on his knees—as he should be—and that she quite enjoys it when he looks up at her between her legs, her hesitation fleeting when he puts his mouth on her and drinks from her with blood-tainted lips.  
  
She moans and he smiles against her when she grips his hair to force his head up against her, holds him against her wetness with hitching breaths and angles her hip so that he will tongue her where she wants. He places her bent leg over his shoulder and she half-laughs, half-moans when he slides three fingers into her and sucks on her nub until she’s breathless and her thighs quivering.

She clenches her cunt as he licks at her and screams his name, forgetting about the open door, the servants nearby and the courtiers already awakened. She kisses him when she descends from her daze and wonders if her courtiers drink blood too, if they like the tang of copper she relishes in along with her arousal.  
  
She still loathes him when she takes him inside her and rakes her nails under his loose tunic, naked as the day she was born while he is still dressed and bloody and fucking her like she wants it. She rips his tunic apart just to touch him a little more. The fabric, damp with the blood and ale he ingested and the sweat cooling between their moving bodies, sticks to his best and he murmurs filthy things into her ears as she gasps and returns every trust, every obscenity. There is an underlying brutality in her gesture when she clutches at the curls of his golden hair presses her lips, feverish and impatient, along his jaw, bites until blood dribbles onto her tongue. She fantasizes about killing him, breathless, about keeping him in her as she beheads him. He is aware, she sees it in the knowing look in his eyes and his breezing laughter brushing her neck as his hand gropes her breast.  
  
He runs golden eyes over her body as his face changes and his rhythm quickens, dark veins crisscrossing under his eyes and poison-dripping teeth elongating into fangs. He could kill her with ease and rolling atop him she wishes she could too, could reclaim the power she once held to decide upon one’s fate, be it only her own, but he has it in the hands that caress her back too softly even when he pulls her to him roughly and kisses her.

She moves up and down until she feels her release, sharp and crisp, and closes her eyes in bliss, welcomes the blinking darkness that will overcome her. There is a question in his eyes, still gold and starved no matter how many times he gorges himself on someone’s else blood and she nods, the terror she expected never coming as he bites into her neck and she falls, clenching down around him, blood everywhere, like it always is with him, in her hair, coiled tightly around his fist, her shaking shoulders, her chest, poison scorching in her veins until she thinks she will faint and he stops.  
  
She looks down at the cut he makes along wrist with distaste. “Will I become like you?”  
  
“No. Drink.”  
  
He comes inside her when she sucks on it.  
  
  
.  
  
.  
  
.  
  
.  
  
“What do you think about?” he asks in the night.  
  
She thinks back on the war, how frightened she was then and how calm she is now when she considers the plans she devised, the allies she is rousing to her cause, the dissensions he knows not amongst in his own allies, the white oak wood she entrusted Lord Fell and Matthew to search for her.  
  
She thinks back on waves of moments lost in time and unnoticeable in appearance. His thumb caressing her fingers as they held court, a bracelet clicking closed around her wrist and his claim that the princess who wore it before was not her equal in beauty or wits, the twirl of her head as he spun her in his arms, the genuine laughter he conjured from her, her spontaneous response to search for him upon a dreadful vision the night they had sailed to visit a neighboring kingdom.  
  
She thinks it's not enough.  
  
“Nothing,” she yawns.


End file.
